This course will transition you from working on a single computer to an entire fleet. Systems administration is the field of IT that’s responsible for maintaining reliable computers systems in a multi-user environment. In this course, you’ll learn about the infrastructure services that keep all organizations, big and small, up and running. We’ll deep dive on cloud so that you’ll understand everything from typical cloud infrastructure setups to how to manage cloud resources. You'll also learn how to manage and configure servers and how to use industry tools to manage computers, user information, and user productivity. Finally, you’ll learn how to recover your organization’s IT infrastructure in the event of a disaster.
By the end of this course you’ll be able to:
● utilize best practices for choosing hardware, vendors, and services for your organization
● understand how the most common infrastructure services that keep an organization
running work, and how to manage infrastructure servers
● understand how to make the most of the cloud for your organization
● manage an organization’s computers and users using the directory services, Active
Directory, and OpenLDAP
● choose and manage the tools that your organization will use
● backup your organization’s data and know how to recover your IT infrastructure in the case of
a disaster
● utilize systems administration knowledge to plan and improve processes for IT environments

Reviews

DY

I just cannot thank Google and Coursera enough for this opportunity. This particular module of the entire Google IT Programme really kindled my curiosity to learn more using this path. Thank you.

JY

Jun 03, 2018

Filled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled StarFilled Star

Lots of great information! The last assignment was pretty challenging. Make sure to include what specific action, service, or product you would recommend and why it would help solve the problem.

From the lesson

Software and Platform Services

In the third week of this course, we'll explore software and platform services. We'll cover what types of software and platform services you may encounter in a tech role and how to manage them. We'll learn how to configure email services, security services, file services, print services, and platform services. We'll explore ways to troubleshoot platform services and common issues to look out for. By the end of this module, you'll understand how to setup and manage the IT infrastructure services to help a business stay productive, keep information secure, and deliver applications to its users.

Taught By

Google

Transcript

The last software services that we'll discuss are security services. Security is super important to all organizations. It's integrated into pretty much all aspects of an IT infrastructure service. We'll dive deeper into this in the last course on IT security. For now, remember that there are lots of different security protocols that are put in place for all sorts of things, keeping data encrypted, authentication, etc. If you ever manage a web server that serves content to other users, you want to let them know that when they access your website, you're keeping their interaction with you as secure as possible. Let's say that you have an online bank account that you're logging into. The URL will most likely begin with an HTTPS. Remember that HTTP stands for HyperText Transfer Protocol, which is used to format and transfer web content around the Internet. When you enter in a URL, you notice that HTTP comes before everything else. HTTPS, or Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure is a secure version of HTTP. It makes sure the communication your web browser has with the website is secured through encryption. HTTPS is also referred to as HTTP over TLS or HTTP over SSL. This is because there are two protocols that enables us to make our web servers secure. The first is Transport Layer Security protocol, or TLS, which is the most popular way to keep communications secure over a network. TLS is widely used to keep web browsing secure, but it can be used in a lot of other applications, too. We'll do a deep dive into the technical details of TLS in a later course. The second protocol is Secure Socket Layer protocol, or SSL. It's a way of securing communication between a web server and client. But it's pretty old and insecure, so it's been deprecated in favor of TLS. You may still see it today being used over the TLS protocol like SSL/TLS. The two protocols are often used interchangeably. In fact, SSL version 3.0, was essentially TLS version 1.0. But TLS's new features and updates have made it more secure than SSL. So if you're managing an organization's website on a server, how do you enable TLS on the server so that the site can be using HTTPS? Well, you need to get a digital certificate of trust from an entity called a certificate authority. The certificate authority grants a certificate to your website saying that it trusts that you control the web server. And verifies that you are who you say you are. Once it does that, you can install the certificate on your web server. That way, when users visit your site, they'll see the HTTPS in the URL instead of just HTTP. You'll learn more about certificates and certificate authorities in an upcoming course. For now, think of certificates as a way to verify that something is trustworthy. Security is an integral part of IT, and it's not just the responsibility of security engineers. Everyone should be thinking about security. And all layers of your infrastructure should have a layer of security built upon them. There are lots of other security software that you can add to your IT infrastructure, which we'll dive into in the last course. For now, it's a good idea to know the basics of keeping a web server secure with HTTPS.

Explore our Catalog

Join for free and get personalized recommendations, updates and offers.